I’ve seen plenty of bad videos. Even watched French TV. But you if you’ve a really strong stomach you can see one of the worst camera tests ever from the Gadget show on Five TV. The Online Photographer, where I found the link, calls it “Kind of long but good fun‘” but they obviously have a very different idea of fun to me. It’s bad, bad, bad. So bad that at times it’s laughable, but also so bad I can’t force myself to watch a second time.
A male presenter with an incredibly staring eye problem and an uncomfortable twitch and a patronisingly eager female, both blessed by bad script writers, dress up in Avengers leatherware and get themselves photographed in a studio on a Nikon D700 and a Nikon F5 using the same Nikon lens (the photographer gets into the spirit of the act later with a bad black cloth cap.) He works with ISO 400 film in the F5 (it seems a bad choice to me) and sets the D700 to ISO 400 too.
Then they get prints made the size of the side of a bus and have them erected on the rather boring exterior of a modern building in the centre of Birmingham, UK, then run along (yes, they do run) and look at them. What a surprise, the digital camera gives the better print.
Better colour, more details in black, less grain, greater clarity. Digital gives the far better result. Which has been pretty obvious to all of us who actually use digital cameras for several years now.
It would have been interesting if they had made the film enlargement optically :-) No mention of how they scanned the film. They could have waited a little while and tried the new Ektar 100 c41 neg film “world’s finest grain” but then of course they would have had the D3x to play with as well.
Perhaps they could have asked Ken Rockwell for advice.
I suspect they did :-)